Caroline Lucas has stood down as head of the UK Green Party. Lucas is her party’s first and only Member of Parliament, an honor that voters nowadays rate about as highly as being “the last person to be hanged in England.” It’s a fascinating piece of trivia, but not the most flattering way to be remembered.

With Lucas gone the Greens will set about choosing a replacement in the traditional manner: whoever can eat a four course meal in a vegan restaurant and survive wins. Expect the contest to come down to a tight race between an unshaven sociology lecturer and a dolphin called Roger. Roger will win on personality.

I lived for two years in the Green Party’s political stronghold of Brighton, a seaside town on the Sussex coast. I was still a partisan Labour man back then, so I witnessed firsthand the slow decline of socialism and its eclipse by the ecology movement. The cause was demographics. Our people were dying out or couldn’t be bothered to vote. The Greens, on the other hand, benefited from the influx of middle-class professionals and students. By nature, Brighton is a working-class town (even those bits of it that are proudly gay), but gentrification took its toll in the noughties and changed its character. I lived in a Georgian dive opposite the burnt-out pier for just £650 a month. Three minutes down the road, BBC producers were forking out £2000 for a studio flat opposite an excrement-fuelled eco garden. The future was Green.

Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy and ‘green guru’, is the latest person to admit to doubts about climate change.

‘I’m not sure I believe in it,’ he announced at a meeting of the Energy Department, prompting one aide to blurt out: ‘Did I just hear that correctly?’

According to one witness, Hilton, 41, the man who coined the slogan ‘Vote Blue and Go Green’ and changed the Tory symbol from a Stalinist style torch to an eco friendly tree, said: ‘Climate change arguments are highly complex.

‘My focus has always been more on using green issues to improve the quality of life.’

Hilton famously persuaded David Cameron to go to the Arctic with a pack of huskies to prove that he was determined to combat global warming in his early days as Tory leader.

Now, however, Hilton as become a big fan of former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, a vocal critic of the global warming lobby.

Tonight on Channel 4 Niall Ferguson will be explaining why Western Civilisation is on its last legs. The reason for this is very simple: we no longer understand or value our civilisation; indeed many of us feel rather embarrassed about it. We have been taught to view all our great historical achievements through a filter of post-colonial guilt; we have learned the weasel art of cultural relativism where, in their own special way, cultures that practise female circumcision and bury homosexuals under walls are just as vibrant, valid and meaningful as the one that gave us Michelangelo, penicillin and the splitting of the atom; we’ve been persuaded that elitism and authority are undesirable (cf Jamie’s Dream School); we’ve bought heavily into the fashionable meme that mankind is a cancer on the earth and that the proper thing to do is abandon progress, destroy our economies, limit population growth and try to recapture an agrarian idyll which of course never existed except in the imaginations of pastoral poets and the Prince of Wales.

The last part is the theme of my book Watermelons. Though I say it myself it couldn’t be coming out at a more desperate time. To show how desperate, let us consider the words of Steve Holliday, chief executive of the National Grid, interviewed last week on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“The grid is going to be a very different system in 2020, 2030. We keep thinking that we want it to be there and provide power when we need it. It is going to be much smarter than that. We are going to change our own behaviour and consume it when it is available and available cheaply.”

AS we shiver in the coldest start to winter in living memory, you may wonder whatever happened to global warming. Good news! Doomsday is indefinitely postponed. Three years ago, the UN inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (iPCC) made blood-curdling fore- casts of melting ice caps causing sea levels to rise 13ft by 2100. such low-lying countries as The Maldives and Bangladesh would be submerged. London and New York would be swamped.

Last week, the Met Office downgraded the prediction to a “worst case” threat of only 6ft. in a masterpiece of understatement, even this is said to be “unlikely” and a more plausible figure is eight inches. As this is just a game of think-of-a-number, we might as well consult Mystic Meg, especially as only five weeks ago the Met Office predicted a “milder than average winter”.

Will this chink of doubt silence the prophets of doom? No. There’s too much money at stake for that. Man-made global warming is a new religion whose high priests and acolytes’ well-paid jobs depend on propagating their vision of hell- fire and destruction.

As i write, 20,000 of them are basking in sunshine at the upmarket Mexican resort of Cancun for the latest iPCC junket. why aren’t such gatherings ever held in places like sunderland or Detroit, where the beach is likely to be less of a distraction?

There is a revolution coming that is likely to burst the green global warming bubble: the temperature trend used by the IPCC (the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) to support their conclusion about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is likely to turn out to be fake. The situation will become clear once Virginia's attorney general, Kenneth Cuccinelli, obtains information now buried in e-mails at the University of Virginia. Or Hearings on Climategate by the U.S. Congress may uncover the "smoking gun" that demonstrates that the warming trend used by the IPCC does not really exist.

It has become increasingly clear that any observed warming during the past century is of natural origin and that the human contribution is insignificant. It is doubtful that any significant warming is attributable to greenhouse gases at all.

Once the public accepts these scientific conclusions, it should have immense consequences for policy. It will mean that the impact of rising CO2 levels is negligibly small, as has already been concluded by the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change), a group of scientists skeptical of the U.N.-supported IPCC. It would also mean that wind energy, solar energy, and other "non-carbon" energy sources are not needed and are in fact counterproductive. It would remove the need for alternative fuels such as ethanol (which might please many true environmentalists). It would also mean that carbon trading, cap and trade, and fanciful schemes for carbon capture and sequestration would all end up in the dustbin of history.

As experts call for action now, the coalition withholds green funding and appeals to private enterprise.

Britons must radically change the way they live and work to adapt to being "stuck with unavoidable climate change" the Government will caution this week, as it unveils a dramatic vision of how society will be altered by floods, droughts and rising temperatures.

The coalition will signal a major switch towards adapting to the impact of existing climate change, away from Labour's heavy emphasis on cutting carbon emissions to reverse global temperature rises. Caroline Spelman, the Tory Secretary of State for the Environment, will use her first major speech on climate change since taking office to admit that the inevitable severe weather conditions will present a "survival-of-the- fittest scenario", with only those who have planned ahead able to thrive. Adapting to climate change will be "at the heart of our agenda", she is expected to say.

The Prince of Wales – who also happens to be our future monarch, unfortunately – has embarked on an eco-tour of Britain. He is urging us not to throw away any of the £4,000 bespoke Huntsman suits we might have mouldering in the back of our wardrobes, demonstrating how easy it is to fashion a handy Gladstone bag from one’s old hunting boots or an egg whisk from one’s unwanted tiaras, and reminding us that unless we convert our Aston Martins to biofuels by the end of next week (just like he has done) then the polar ice caps will most assuredly melt and we’ll all die.

Needless to say, he has found the perfect means of transport by which to convey this important message: a huge train powered by possibly the most ecologically disastrous fuel source yet devised by mankind. Biofuel.

A reader – Alan Wesson – has written into BBC Radio 4’s Today programme lambasting them for their characteristically toadyish reporting of this lunacy. Since the BBC won’t do anything about it, let me reprint the letter here:

It’s not been easy being green since the revelations of Climategate and mounting evidence that the science behind man’s influence on climate change is far from accurate, let alone settled. No wonder then that many greens chose to vent their frustration at skeptics and blame their ideological opponents for their troubles.

In the past decade, leaders of the global warming movement have won international fame and acclaim, including Nobel prizes and Oscars. They have been feted by celebrities and world leaders alike as a supportive press looked on and wrote glowing tomes about their wisdom and importance. Politicians and businesses were cowed into submission by the mighty green machine and eagerly adorned themselves with a green mantle to appeal to voters and consumers.

Despite this support and for no want of funding, time and again the green agenda stumbled and failed to achieve action. Despite regular and desperate cries of alarm that the conference du jour represented mankind’s ‘last hope’, nothing meaningful happens. The Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997, but few industrialized western nations have come close to meeting their emission reduction targets. Since Kyoto there have been significant failures in Bali, Copenhagen, Bonn and next up is Cancun. There is no reason to suspect that the outcome will be different there.

Even the UN and the EU are wising up to the greenhouse gas scam, "the biggest environmental scandal in history"

It is now six months since I reported on what even environmentalists are calling "the biggest environmental scandal in history". Indeed this is a scam so glaringly bizarre that even the UN and the EU have belatedly announced that they are thinking of taking steps to stop it. The essence of the scam is that a handful of Chinese and Indian firms are deliberately producing large quantities of an incredibly powerful "greenhouse gas" which we in the West – including UK taxpayers – then pay them billions of dollars to destroy.

The key to this scam, designed to curb global warming, is a scheme known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and administered by the UN. It enables firms and governments in the developed world to buy "credits" which allow them to continue emitting greenhouse gases. These are sold to them, through well-rewarded brokers, from firms in developing countries that can show they have nominally reduced their emissions.

Easily the largest and most lucrative component in the CDM market is a peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons, classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases vastly more damaging than carbon dioxide. The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on producing a refrigerant gas known as HCF-22 until 2030. But a by-product of this process is HCF-23, which is supposed to be 11,700 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. By destroying the HCF-23, the firms can claim Certified Emission Reduction credits worth billions of dollars when sold to the West (while much of the useful HCF-22 is sold onto the international black market).

Last year, destruction of CFCs accounted for more than half the CDM credits issued, in a market that will eventually, it is estimated, be worth $17 billion. Of the 1,390 CDM projects so far approved, less than 1 per cent accounts for 36 per cent of the total value.